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G. Riva, M.T. Anguera, B.K. Wiederhold and F. Mantovani (Eds.)
From Communication to Presence: Cognition, Emotions and Culture towards the
Ultimate Communicative Experience. Festschrift in honor of Luigi Anolli
IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2006, (c) All rights reserved - http://www.emergingcommunication.com
and cultural boundaries have a strong influence on the possibility of action and the
experienced presence of the subject.
In this context, a breakdown occurs when, during our activity, we are forced to
stop the use of intentions-in-action. To illustrate, imagine sitting in a balcony
engrossed in reading a book on a pleasant evening. As the sun sets and the light
diminishes one continues reading (intention-in-action), engrossed in the story until
one becomes aware that the light is no longer suitable for reading. In such conditions,
before any overt change in behavior, what we experience is a breakdown in reading
and a shift of attention from the book to the light illuminating the book. At that stage
we are not present anymore in the reading and we have to reflexively plan an action
(prior intention) to switch on the light on the balcony.
This vision has two important suggestions for media developers:
o it is also “external” to the subject what is not related to his/her activities,
interests and values.
o to be more “present” in the situation (social and cultural space) defined by a
symbolic system, the user has to be aware of its meaning. Only “making sense
there”, the user really experiences a full sense of presence [104, 117].
3.6 Conclusions
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, underlined in his writings the following
structural (ontological) features of the being:
- Spatiality: the space is not around us but within us;
- Being with: we exist not on our own terms, but only in reference to others.
As we have discussed in the chapter, the recent outcomes of cognitive science
support this vision. In particular we showed how different theories from social and
cognitive sciences - Situated Cognition, Embodied Cognition, Enactive Approach,
Situated Simulation, Covert Imitation - and discoveries from neuroscience - Mirror
and Canonical Neurons - have many contact points with this view.
The overall picture we depicted is different from the traditional view of cognition.
Cognition is no more the simple performance of formal operations on abstract
symbols, but has instead deep roots in sensorimotor processing.
Specifically, our conceptual system dynamically produces contextualized
representations (simulations) that support grounded action in different situations.
These simulations include not only sensory states but also motor and mental states.
This is allowed by a common coding - the motor code - shared by perception, action
and concepts. On one side, the vision of an object immediately activates the
appropriate hand shape for using it: seeing a red apple activates a precision grip for
grasping and turning. On the other side, thinking an apple produces the simulation of
an action related to the apple in a specific context of use.
This common coding also allows the subject for natively recognizing actions done
by other beings within the phenomenological contents. Specifically, the subject
predicts the outcome of the identified action using the same simulation mechanism
described above: seeing someone grasping an apple produces a contextualized
simulation of the full course of the action. This covert imitation functions as an
automatic action emulator, tracking the behavior of other subjects in real time to
generate perceptual predictions.
However, this picture has some holes in it: if perception, action and concepts share